The Occult Significance of the Bhagavad Gita

Schmidt Number: S-2787

On-line since: 30th June, 2006

II

T

HE
MORE deeply we penetrate into the occult records of the
various ages and peoples, that is to say, into the truly occult
records, the more we are struck by one feature of them which meets us
again and again. I have already indicated it in discussing the Gospel
of St. John, and again on a later occasion in speaking of the Gospel
of St. Mark. I refer to the fact that on looking deeply into any such
occult record it becomes ever clearer that it is really most
wonderfully composed, that it forms an artistic whole. I could show,
for instance, how St. John's Gospel, when we penetrate into its
depths, reveals a wonderful, artistic composition. With remarkable
dramatic power the story is carried up stage by stage to a great
climax, and then continues from this point onward with a kind of
renewal of dramatic power to the end. You can study this in the
lectures I gave at Cassel on St. John's Gospel in relation to the
three other Gospels, especially to that according to St. Luke.

Most impressive is the
gradual enhancement of the whole composition while the super-sensible
is placed before us in the so-called miracles and signs; each working
up in ever-increasing wonder to the sign that meets us in the
initiation of Lazarus. It makes us realize how we can always find
artistic beauty at the foundation of these occult records. I could
show the same for the structure of St. Mark's Gospel. When we regard
such records in their beauty of form and their dramatic power, we can
indeed conclude that just because they are true such records
cannot be other than artistically, beautifully composed, in the
deepest sense of the word. For the moment we will only indicate this
fact, as we may come back to it in the course of these lectures.

Now it is remarkable
that the same thing meets us again in the
Bhagavad Gita.
There is a wonderful intensification of the narrative, one might say,
a hidden artistic beauty in the song, so that if nothing else were to
touch the soul of one studying this sublime Gita, he still
could not help being impressed by its marvelous composition. Let us
begin by indicating a few of the outstanding points — and we
will confine ourselves today to the first four discourses —
because these points are important both for the artistic structure
and the deep occult truths that it contains.

First of all Arjuna
meets us. Facing the bloodshed in which he is to take part, he grows
weak. He sees all that is to take place as a battle of brothers
against brothers, his blood relations. He shrinks back. He will not
fight against them. While fear and terror come over him and he is
horror-stricken, his charioteer suddenly appears as the instrument
through which Krishna, God, is to speak to him. Here in this first
episode we already have a moment of great intensity and also an
indication of deep occult truth. Anyone who finds the way, by
whatever path, into the spiritual worlds, even though he may have
gone only a few steps — or even had only a dim presentiment of
the way to be experienced — such a person will be aware of the
deep significance of this moment.

As a rule we cannot
enter the spiritual worlds without passing through a deep upheaval in
our souls. We have to experience something which disturbs and shakes
all our forces, filling us with intense feeling. Emotions that are
generally spread out over many moments, over long periods of living,
whose permanent effect on the soul is therefore weaker — such
feelings are concentrated in a single moment and storm through us
with tremendous force when we enter the occult worlds. Then we
experience a kind of inner shattering, which can indeed be compared
to fear, terror and anxiety, as though we were shrinking back from
something almost with horror. Such experiences belong to the initial
stages of occult development, to entering the spiritual worlds. It is
just for this reason that such great care must be taken to give the
right advice to those who would enter the spiritual worlds through
occult training. Such a person must be prepared so that he may
experience this upheaval as a necessary event in his soul life
without its encroaching on his bodily life and health, because his
body must not suffer a like upheaval. That is the essential thing. We
must learn to suffer the convulsions of our soul with outward
equanimity and calm.

This
is true not only for our bodily processes. The soul forces we need
for everyday living, our ordinary intellectual powers, even those of
imagination, of feeling and will — these too must not be
allowed to become unbalanced. The upheaval that may be the
starting-point for occult life must take place in far deeper layers
of the soul, so that we go through our external life as before,
without anything being noticed in us outwardly, while within we may
be living through whole worlds of shattering soul-experience. That is
what it means to be ripe for occult development: To be able to
experience such inward convulsions without losing one's outer balance
and calm. To this end a person who is striving to become ripe for
occult development must widen the circle of his interests beyond his
everyday life. He must get away from that to which he is ordinarily
attached from morning to night, and reach out to interests that move
on the great horizon of the world.

We must be able to
undergo the experience of doubting all truth and all knowledge. We
must have the power to do this with the same intensity of feeling
people generally have only where their everyday interests are
concerned. We must be able to feel with the destiny of all
mankind, with as much interest as we usually feel in our own destiny,
or perhaps in that of our nearest connections of family, nation, or
race. If we cannot do this, we are not yet completely ready for
occult development.

For this reason modern
anthroposophy, if pursued earnestly and worthily, is the right
preparation in our age for a true occult development. Let those who
are absorbed in the petty material interests of the immediate
present, who cannot find sufficient interest to follow the
anthroposophist in looking out over world and planetary destinies,
over the historical epochs and races of mankind — let them
scoff if they will! One who would prepare himself for an occult
development must lift up his eyes to the heights where the interests
of mankind, of the earth, of the whole planetary system become his
own. When a person's interests are gradually sharpened and widened
through the study of anthroposophy, which leads even without occult
training to an understanding of occult truths, then he is being
rightly prepared for an occult path.

In our time there are
many who have such interests for the whole of mankind. More often
they are not to be found among the intellectuals but are people who
appear to lead quite simple lives. Yes, there are many today who have
a humble place in life and as if by natural instinct feel this
interest in the whole of mankind. That is why anthroposophy is in
such harmony with the spirit of our age.

First, then, we must
learn of the mighty upheaval of the soul that has to come at the
beginning of occult experience. With wonderful truth the
Bhagavad Gita
sets such a moment of upheaval at the starting-point of
Arjuna's experience, only he does not go through an occult training
but is placed into this moment by his destiny. He is placed into the
battle without being able to recognize its necessity, its purpose, or
its aim. All he sees is that blood relations are about to fight
against each other. Such a soul as Arjuna can be shaken by that to
its innermost core, for he has to say to himself, “Brother
fights against brother. Surely then all the tribal customs will be
shaken and then the tribe itself will wither away and be destroyed,
and all its morality fall into decay! Those laws will be shaken that
in accordance with an eternal destiny place men into castes; and then
will everything be imperiled — man himself, the law, the whole
world. The whole significance of mankind will be in the balance.”
Such is his feeling. It is as though the ground were about to sink
from under his feet, as though an abyss were opening up before him.

Arjuna was a man who
had received into his feeling something that the man of today no
longer knows, but that in those ancient times was a primeval teaching
of tradition. He knew that what is handed on from generation to
generation in mankind is bound up with the woman nature; while
the individual, personal qualities whereby a man stands out from his
blood connections and his family line are bound up with the man
nature. What a man inherits as common, generic qualities is
handed on to the descendants by the woman, whereas what forms him
into a unique, individual being, tearing him out of the generic
succession, is the part he receives from his father. “Must it
not then have an evil effect on the laws that rule woman's nature,”
says Arjuna to himself, “if blood fights against blood?”

There is another
feeling that Arjuna has absorbed, on which for him the whole
well-being of human evolution depends. He feels that the forefathers
of the tribe, the ancestors, are worthy of honor. He feels that their
souls watch over the succeeding generations. For him it is a sublime
service to offer up fires of sacrifice to the Manes, to the holy
souls of the ancestors. But now what must he see? Instead of altars
with sacrificial fires burning on them for the ancestors, he sees
those who should join in kindling such fires assailing one another in
battle. If we would understand a human soul we must penetrate into
its thoughts. Above all we must enter deeply into its feelings
because it is in feeling that the soul is intimately bound up with
its very life. Now think of the great contrast between all that
Arjuna would naturally feel, and the bloody battle of brother against
brother that is actually about to take place. Destiny is hammering at
Arjuna's soul, shaking it to its very depths. It is as though he had
to gaze down into a terrible abyss. Such an upheaval awakens the
forces of the soul and brings it to a vision of occult realities that
at other times are hidden as behind a veil. That is what gives such
dramatic intensity to the
Bhagavad Gita.
The ensuing discourse
is thus placed before us with wonderful power, as developing of
necessity out of Arjuna's destiny, instead of being given us merely
as an academic, pedantic course of instruction in occultism.

Now that Arjuna has
been rightly prepared for the birth of the deeper forces of his soul,
now that he can see these forces in inward vision, there happens what
everyone who has the power to behold it will understand: His
charioteer becomes the instrument through which the god Krishna
speaks to him. In the first four discourses we observe three
successive stages, each higher than the last, each one introducing
something new. Here in these very first discourses we find an accent
that is wonderful in its dramatic art, apart from the fact that it
corresponds to a deep occult truth. The first stage is a teaching
that might appear even trivial to many Westerners in its given form.
Let us admit that at once. (Here I should like to remark, especially
for the benefit of my dear friends here in Finland, that I mean by
“Western” all that lies to the west of the Ural
Mountains, the Volga, the Caspian Sea and Asia Minor — in fact
the whole of Europe. What is to be called Eastern land belongs
essentially in Asia. Of course, America too forms part of the West.)

To begin with then we
find a teaching that might easily appear trivial, especially to a
philosophical mind. For what is the first thing that Krishna says to
Arjuna as a word of exhortation for the battle? “Look there,”
he says, “at those who are to be killed by you; those in your
own ranks who are to be killed and those who are to remain behind,
and consider well this one thing. What dies and what remains alive in
your ranks and in those of the enemy is but the outer physical body.
The spirit is eternal. If your warriors slay those in the ranks over
there they are but slaying the outer body, they are not killing the
spirit, which is eternal. The spirit goes from change to change, from
incarnation to incarnation. It is eternal. This deepest being of man
is not affected in this battle. Rise, Arjuna, rise to the spiritual
standpoint, then you can go and give yourself up to your duty. You
need not shudder nor be sad at heart, for in killing your enemies you
are not killing their essential being.”

Thus speaks Krishna,
and at first hearing his words are in a sense trivial, though in a
special way. In many respects the Westerner is short-sighted in his
thinking and consciousness. He never stops to consider that
everything is evolving. If he says that Krishna's exhortation, as I
have expressed it, is trivial, it is as though one were to say, “Why
do they honor Pythagoras as such a great man when every schoolboy and
girl knows his theorem?” It would be stupid to conclude that
Pythagoras was not a great man in having discovered his theorem just
because every schoolboy understands it! We see how stupid this is,
but we do not notice when we fail to realize that what any Western
philosopher may repeat by rote as the wisdom of Krishna — that
the spirit is eternal, immortal — was a sublime wisdom at the
time Krishna revealed it. Souls like Arjuna did indeed feel that
blood-relations ought not to fight. They still felt the common blood
that flowed in a group of people. To hear it said that “the
spirit is eternal” (spirit in the sense of what is generally
conceived, abstractly, as the center of man's being) — the
spirit is eternal and undergoes transformations, passing from
incarnation to incarnation — this stated in abstract and
intellectual terms was something absolutely new and epoch-making in
its newness when it resounded in Arjuna's soul through Krishna's
words. All the people in Arjuna's environment believed definitely in
reincarnation, but as Krishna taught it, as a general and abstract
idea, it was new, especially in regard to Arjuna's situation.
This is one reason why we had to say that such a truth can only be
called “trivial” in a special sense. That holds true in
another respect as well. Our abstract thought, which we use even in
the pursuit of popular science, which we regard today as quite
natural — this thinking activity was by no means always so
natural and simple.

In order to illustrate
what I say, let me give you a radical example. You will think it
strange that while for all of you it is quite natural to speak of a
“fish,” it was by no means natural for primitive peoples
to do so. Primitive peoples are acquainted with trout and salmon, cod
and herring, but “fish” they do not know. They have no
such word as “fish,” because their thought does not
extend to such abstract generalization. They know individual trees,
but “tree” they do not know. Thinking in such general
concepts is by no means natural to primitive races even in the
present time. This mode of thinking has indeed only entered humanity
in the course of its evolution. In fact, one who considers why it was
that logic first began in the time of ancient Greece, could scarcely
be surprised when the statement is made on occult grounds that
logical thinking has only existed since the period that followed
the original composition of the
Bhagavad Gita.
Krishna impels Arjuna to logical thought, to thinking in abstractions, as
if to a new thing that is only now to enter humanity.

But this activity of
thought that man has developed and takes quite for granted today,
people have the most distorted and unnatural notions about. Western
philosophers in particular have most distorted ideas about thought,
for they generally take it to be merely a photographic reproduction
of external sense reality. They imagine that concepts and ideas and
the whole inner thinking of man simply arises in him out of the
external physical world. While libraries of philosophical words have
been written in the West to prove that thought is merely something
having its origin in the stimulus of the external physical world, it
is only in our time that thought will be valued for what it really
is.

Here I reach a point
that is most important for those who would undergo an occult
development in their own souls. I want to make every effort to get
this point clear. The medieval alchemists used to say — I
cannot now discuss what they really meant by it — that gold
could be made from all metals, gold in any desired amount, but that
one must first have a minute quantity of it. Without that one could
not make gold. Whether or not this is true of gold, it is certainly
true of clairvoyance. No man could actually attain
clairvoyance if he did not have a tiny amount of it already in his
soul. It is generally supposed that men as they are, are not
clairvoyant. If that were true they could never become clairvoyant at
all, because just as the alchemist thought that one must have a
little gold to conjure forth large quantities, so must one already be
a little clairvoyant in order to be able to develop and extend it
more and more. Now you may see two alternatives here and ask, “Do
you think then that we all are clairvoyant, if only slightly, or,
do you think that those of us who are not clairvoyant can never
become so?” This is just the point. It is most important to
understand that there is really no one among you who does not have
this starting-point of clairvoyance, though you may not be conscious
of it. All of you have it. None of you is lacking in it. What is this
that all possess? It is something not generally regarded or valued as
clairvoyance. Let me make a rather crude comparison.

If a pearl is lying in
the roadway and a chicken finds it, the chicken does not value the
pearl. Most men and women today are chickens in this respect. They do
not value the pearl that lies there in full view before them. What
they value is something quite different. They value their concepts
and ideas, but no one could think abstractly, could have
thoughts and ideas, if he were not clairvoyant. In our ordinary
thinking the pearl of clairvoyance is contained from the start. Ideas
arise in the soul through exactly the same process as what gives rise
to its highest powers. It is immensely important to learn to
understand that clairvoyance begins in something common and everyday.
We only have to recognize the super-sensible nature of our concepts
and ideas. We must realize that these come to us from the
super-sensible worlds; only then can we look at the matter rightly.

When I tell you of the
higher hierarchies, of Seraphim and Cherubim and Thrones, right down
to Archangels and Angels, these are beings who must speak to the
human soul from higher spiritual worlds. It is from those worlds that
concepts and ideas come into the human soul, not from the world of
the senses. In the 18th century what was considered a great word was
uttered by a pioneer of thinking, “O, Man, make bold to use thy
power of reason!” Today a great word must resound in men's
souls, “O, Man, make bold to claim thy concepts and ideas as
the beginning of thy clairvoyance.” What I have just expressed
I said many years ago, publicly in my books
Truth and Science
and
The Philosophy of Freedom,
where I showed that human ideas
come from super-sensible, spiritual knowledge. It was not understood
at the time, and no wonder, for those who should have understood it
were — well, like the chickens! We must realize that at the
moment when Krishna stands before Arjuna and gives him the power of
abstract judgment, he is thereby giving him, for the first time in
the whole of evolution, the starting-point for the knowledge of
higher worlds. The spirit can be seen on the very surface of the
changes that take place within the external world of sense. Bodies
die; the spirit, the abstract, the essential being, is eternal. The
spiritual can be seen playing on the surface of phenomena. This is
what Krishna would reveal to Arjuna as the beginning of a new
clairvoyance for men.

One thing is necessary
for men of today if they would attain to an inwardly-experienced
truth. They must have once passed through the feeling of the fleeting
nature of all outer transformations. They must have experienced the
mood of infinite sadness, of infinite tragedy, and at the same time
the exultation of joy. They must have felt the breath of the
ephemeral that streams out from all things. They must have been able
to fix their interest on this coming forth and passing away again,
the transitoriness of the world of sense. Then, when they have been
able to feel the deepest pain and the fullest delight in the external
world, they must once have been absolutely alone — alone with
their concepts and ideas. They must have had the feeling, “In
these concepts I grasp the mystery of the worlds; I take hold of the
outer edge of cosmic being,” — the very expression I once
used in my
The Philosophy of Freedom!
This must be experienced,
not merely understood intellectually, and if you would experience it,
it must be in deepest loneliness. Then you have another feeling. On
the one hand you experience the majesty of the world of ideas that is
spread out over the All. On the other hand you experience with
the deepest bitterness that you have to separate yourself from space
and time in order to be together with your concepts and ideas.
Loneliness! It is the icy cold of loneliness. Furthermore, it comes
to you that the world of ideas has now drawn together as in a single
point of this loneliness. Now you say, I am alone with my world of
ideas. You become utterly bewildered in your world of ideas, an
experience that stirs you to the depths of your soul. At length you
say to yourself, “Perhaps all this is only I myself; perhaps
the only truth about these laws is that they exist in the point of my
own loneliness.” Thus you experience, infinitely enhanced,
utter doubt in all existence.

When you have this
experience in your world of ideas, when the full cup of doubt in all
existence has been poured out with pain and bitterness over your
soul, then only are you ripe to understand how, after all, it is not
the infinite spaces and periods of time of the physical world from
which your ideas have come. Now only, after the bitterness of doubt,
you open yourself to the regions of the spiritual and know that your
doubt was justified, and in what sense it was justified. For it had
to be, since you imagined that the ideas had come into your soul from
the times and spaces of the physical world. How do you now feel your
world of ideas having experienced its origin in the spiritual worlds?
Now for the first time you feel yourself inspired. Before, you were
feeling the infinite void spread around you like a dark abyss. Now
you begin to feel that you are standing on a rock that rises up out
of the abyss. You know with certainty, “Now I am connected with
the spiritual worlds. They, not the world of sense, have bestowed on
me my world of ideas.”

This is the next stage
for the evolving soul. It is the stage where man begins to be deeply
in earnest with what has today come to be a trivial, commonplace
truth. To bear this feeling in your heart will prepare you to receive
in a true way the first truth that Krishna gives to Arjuna after the
mighty upheaval and convulsion in his soul: The truth of the eternal
spirit living through outer transformations. To abstract
understanding we speak in concepts and ideas. Krishna speaks to
Arjuna's heart. What may be trivial and commonplace for the
understanding is infinitely deep and sublime to the heart of man.

We see how the first
stage shows itself at once as a necessary consequence of the deeply
moving experience that is presented to us at the start of the
Bhagavad Gita.
Now the next stage.

It is easy to speak of
what is often called dogma in occultism — something that
is accepted in blind faith and given out as gospel truth. Let me
suggest to you that it would be quite simple for someone to come
forward and say, “This fellow has published a book on Occult
Science, speaking in it about Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions, and
there is no way of controlling these statements. They can only be
accepted as dogma.” I could understand such a thing being said,
because it corresponds to the superficial nature of our age; and
there is no getting away from it, our age is superficial.
Indeed, under certain conditions this objection would not be without
foundation. It would be justified, for example, if you were to tear
out of the book all the pages that precede the chapter on the Saturn
evolution. If anyone were to begin reading the book at this chapter
it would be nothing but dogma. If, however, the author
prefaces it with the other chapters, he is by no means a dogmatist
because he shows what paths the soul has to go through in order to
reach such conceptions. That is the point, that it has been shown in
the book how every individual man, if he reaches into the depths of
his soul, is bound to come to such conceptions. Herein all dogmatism
ceases.

Thus we can feel it
natural that Krishna, having brought Arjuna into the world of ideas
and wishing to lead him on into the occult world, now goes on to show
him the next stage, how every soul can reach that higher world if it
finds the right starting-point. Krishna then must begin by rejecting
every form of dogmatism, and he does so radically. Here we come up
against a hard saying by Krishna. He absolutely rejects what for
centuries had been most holy to the highest men of that age —
the contents of the Vedas. He says, “Hold not to the Vedas, nor
to the word of the Vedas. Hold fast to Yoga!” That is to say,
“Hold fast to what is within thine own soul!”

Let us grasp what
Krishna means by this exhortation. He does not mean that the contents
of the Vedas are untrue. He does not want Arjuna to accept what is
given in the Vedas dogmatically as the disciples of the Veda
teaching do. He wants to inspire him to take his start from the very
first original point whence the human soul evolves. For this purpose
all dogmatic wisdom must be laid aside. We can imagine Krishna saying
to himself that even though Arjuna will in the end reach the very
same wisdom that is contained in the Vedas, still he must be drawn
away from them, for he must go his own way, beginning with the
sources in his own soul. Krishna rejects the Vedas, whether their
content is true or untrue. Arjuna's path must start from himself,
through his own inwardness he must come to recognize Krishna. Arjuna
must be assumed to have in himself what a man can and must have if he
is really to enter into the concrete truths of the super-sensible
worlds. Krishna has called Arjuna's attention to something that from
then onward is a common attribute of humanity. Having led him to this
point he must lead him further and bring him to recognize what he is
to achieve through Yoga. Thus, Arjuna must first undergo Yoga. Here
the poem rises to another level.

In this second stage we
see how the
Bhagavad Gita
goes on through the first four
discourses with ever-increasing dramatic impulse, coming at length to
what is most individual of all. Krishna describes the path of Yoga to
Arjuna. We shall speak of this more in detail tomorrow. He describes
the path that Arjuna must take in order to pass from the everyday
clairvoyance of concepts and ideas to what can only be attained
through Yoga. Concepts only require to be placed in the right light;
but Arjuna has to be guided to Yoga. This is the second stage.

The third stage shows
once more an enhancement of dramatic power, and again comes the
expression of a deep occult truth. Let us assume that someone really
takes the Yoga path. He will rise at length from his ordinary
consciousness to a higher state of consciousness, which includes not
only the ego that lies between the limits of birth and death but what
passes from one incarnation to the next. The soul wakens to know
itself in an expanded ego. It grows into a wider consciousness. The
soul goes through a process that is essentially an everyday process
but that is not experienced fully in our everyday life because man
goes to sleep every night. The sense world fades out around him and
he becomes unconscious of it. Now for every human soul the
possibility exists of letting this world of sense vanish from his
consciousness as it does when he goes to sleep, and then to live in
higher worlds as in an absolute reality. Thereby man rises to a high
level of consciousness. We shall still have to speak of Yoga, and
also of the modern exercises that make this possible. But when man
gradually attains to where he no longer, consciously, lives and feels
and knows in himself, but lives and feels and knows together
with the whole earth, then he grows into a higher level of
consciousness where the things of the sense world vanish for him as
they do in sleep.

However, before man can
attain this level he must be able to identify himself with the soul
of his planet, earth. We shall see that this is possible. We know
that man not only experiences the rhythm of sleeping and waking but
other rhythms of the earth as well — of summer and winter. When
one follows the path of Yoga or goes through a modern occult
training, he can lift himself above the ordinary consciousness that
experiences the cycles of sleeping and waking, summer and winter. He
can learn to look at himself from outside. He becomes aware of being
able to look back at himself just as he ordinarily looks at things
outside himself. Now he observes the things, the cycles in external
life. He sees alternating conditions. He realizes how his body, so
long as he is outside himself, takes on a form similar to that of the
earth in summer with all its vegetation. What material science
discovers and calls nerves he begins to perceive as a
sprouting forth of something plant-like at the time of going to
sleep, and when he returns again into everyday consciousness he feels
how this plant-like life shrinks together again and becomes the
instrument for thinking, feeling and willing in his waking
consciousness. He feels his going out from the body and returning
into it analogous to the alternation of summer and winter on the
earth. In effect he feels something summer-like in going to sleep and
something winter-like in waking up — not as one might imagine,
the opposite way round. From this moment onward he learns to
understand what the spirit of the earth is, and how it is asleep in
summer and awake in winter, not vice versa. He realizes the wonderful
experience of identifying himself with the spirit of the earth. From
this moment he says to himself, “I live not only inside my
skin, but as a cell lives in my bodily organism so do I live in the
organism of the earth. The earth is asleep in summer and awake in
winter as I am asleep and awake in the alternation of night and day.
And as the cell is to my consciousness, so am I to the consciousness
of the earth.”

The path of Yoga,
especially in its modern sense, leads to this expansion of
consciousness, to the identification of our own being with a more
comprehensive being. We feel ourselves interwoven with the whole
earth. Then as men we no longer feel ourselves bound to a particular
time and place, but we feel our humanity such as it has developed
from the very beginning of the earth. We feel the age-long succession
of our evolutions through the course of the evolution of the earth.
Thus Yoga leads us on to feel our atonement with what goes from one
incarnation to another in the earth's evolution. That is the third
stage.

This is the reason for
the great beauty in the artistic composition of the
Bhagavad Gita.
In its climaxes, its inner artistic form, it reflects deep occult
truths. Beginning with an instruction in the ordinary concepts of our
thinking it goes on to an indication of the path of Yoga. Then at the
third stage to a description of the marvelous expansion of man's
horizon over the whole earth, where Krishna awakens in Arjuna the
idea, “All that lives in your soul has lived often before, only
you know nothing of it. But I have this consciousness in myself when
I look back on all the transformations through which I have lived,
and I will lead you up so that you may learn to feel yourself as I
feel myself.” A new moment of dramatic force as beautiful as it
is deeply and occultly true!

Thus we come to see the
evolution of mankind from out of its everyday consciousness, from the
pearl in the roadway that only needs to be recognized, from the
particular world of thoughts and concepts that are a matter of
everyday life in any one age, up to the point from where we can look
out over all that we really have in us, which lives on from
incarnation to incarnation on the earth.